Whose geography? Education as politics

• Main Author: Castree, Noel
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Research Online 2005
• Subjects: education; politics; geography; whose; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://ro.uow.edu.au/sspapers/1127

If you're reading these words you're almost certainly a student studying degree-level geography in an English-speaking country. This chapter is probably on a reading list for a course you're taking on the nature of contemporary geography. Whether you're an undergraduate or a Master's student, the course is doubtless a compulsory part of your degree. You may not like this fact. Unless you're intending to go on to become a university geographer yourself, you may well think that the course is both boring and rather pointless. After all, who, you might ask (apart from people like me and your professors), really cares about such questions as 'Is geography a divided discipline?' or 'Is geography a science?' (the focus of Chapters 4 and 6 in this volume). Surely there are more interesting and relevant things you could be learning about - the kinds of things, in fact, dealt with in your other geography degree modules (such as why famines still occur in a world of food surpluses, why the Antarctic ice sheet is apparently collapsing or how to perform a Chi square test).